Over the last few weeks I have been engrossed in a book by John Gribben called The Scientists. The book is, as described, "a history of Science told through the lives of its greatest inventors." The book offers brief biographies of many scientists that are very well known, like Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, as well as more obscure inventors and researchers like Thomas Digges (the first to suggest that the universe is infinite), Pierre Gassendi (who reinvigorated the idea of matter being composed of "atoms" which existed in a void), and Marcello Malpighi (who discovered capillaries and completed William Harvey's description of the circulation of blood.) And that is only in the first quarter of the book.
For anyone interested in understanding how we have come to stand at the peak of an edifice based on the painstakingly accumulated knowledge that forms the basis of the life we lead, this book is invaluable, not to mention easily digested.
Beyond the readability and the awe with which you read of how mere men and women have lifted us by our book straps, two things struck me about these exceptional men (and a few women of science) to whom we owe so much. One was their passionate dedication to understanding the world around them. From myth and mystery, magic and irrationality, they struggled to find ways to understand what they were experiencing. When you understand how difficult that task remains for the sophisticated denizens of 21st century civilization, their feat takes on even greater meaning.
The second thing that struck me and stayed with me was how fleeting their time was. Nicolaus Copernicus, who removed the Earth from the center of the universe and intuited its revolution around the sun (the first crucial step in understanding the universe) died at 70, an old man. Andreas Vesalius, the first enlightenment man to begin the systematic study of anatomy, died of an unknown illness at 50. William Gilbert, who performed the first scientific study of magnetism and was named "the first scientist" by Gribben, died at 59. Rene Descartes, a giant of science and philosophy, who insisted that the world could be understood by reason and the scientific method, died just short of his 54th birthday.
I could go on, but the salient point is that all these men, even Galileo who lived to be78, died at an age that nowadays we would consider far too young. Building on the structure that these people helped to midwife, we are now approaching a time when aging could well be tamed, if not completely conquered, and that is the subject of Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey's book on "the rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime."
de Grey organizes his book in three parts. Part I explores the all too human resistance to the idea that aging can be approached as a problem to be scientifically solved. He describes many of the forces that mitigate against a societal investment in fighting aging. He describes the Tithonus error, the genesis of his breakthrough conception of the SENS approach, and the inertia of the scientific community. (He includes an oft quoted observation by the physicist Max Planck that "science advances funeral by funeral" as well as J. B. S. Haldane's famous quip that, in regards to new ideas in science, "there are four stages of acceptance: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse point of view; (iii) this is true, but unimportant; (iv) I always said so.")
In Part II, de Grey lays out in some detail his engineering approach to the problem of aging and suggests that aging can be understood with a limited number of descriptors:
There are mutations in our chromosomes, of course, which cause cancer. There is glycation, the warping of proteins by glucose. There are the various kinds of junk that accumulate outside the cell ("extracellular aggregates"): beta amyloid, the lesser-known transthyretin, and possibly other substances of the same general sort. There is also the unwholesome goo that builds up within the cell ({intracellular aggregates"), such as lipofuscin. There's cellular senescence, the "aging" of individual cells, which puts them into a state of arrested growth and causes them to produce chemical signals dangerous to their neighbors. And there's the depletion of the stem cell pools essential to healing and maintenance of tissues.
And of course, there are mitochondrial mutations, which seem to disrupt cellular biochemistry by increasing oxidative stress.
For those of us who have been interested in this area of research, these are familiar topics. However, de Grey does an excellent job of making the research, which can seem (and is) exceptionally complex, understandable and approachable. But here is his key insight: there is nothing about these problems that is resistant to understanding and remediation given enough scientific time, energy, and money. In other words, researchers are already working on the problems (although often without explicitly working on "curing" aging) and none of the problems appear to be impossible to solve!
There is a very human desire to minimize disappointment. Almost everyone at one time or another has fantasized about living forever. Human beings from time immemorial have searched for the Fountain of Youth. To imagine we could actually be approaching such a resolution would be too painful for many; the possibility would be rejected as preferable to having hopes dashed. Yet by building on the life's work of the brilliant and persistent men and women of the last 500 years, we are indeed approaching the threshold of astounding advances in all areas of information technology and biology is increasingly becoming an information science. Whether we can achieve true immortality is a tantalizing possibility (and it is no coincidence that Tantalus was doomed to the deepest level of Hades for stealing the secrets of the Gods.) If it is possible, and while the problem is complex that does not mean it is impossible, some of us who are alive today may well achieve significant breakthroughs in longevity. Societal support will be necessary if we want to hasten progress and this is a key reason de Grey has published his work now.
When I fortuitously juxtaposed Ending Aging and The Scientists, it occurred to me that all of these great men and women who came before me died too soon, their work unfinished. I suspect most of us, even now the beneficiaries of anti-aging science (after all, what are anti-hypertensives and statins, if not anti-aging medications) do not wish to suffer the same way. No one wants to die with their work here unfinished.
Buy the book and support SENS.
More on Ending Aging at Fight Aging, The Methuselah Foundation, the Longevity Meme, and the Speculist.
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